Living with a Nexus 7 Tablet: A $199 Winner

I shared my first impressions of the Nexus 7 tablet when I was at Google I/O a couple of weeks ago, and while I liked it then, the more I use it, the more I'm finding to like. As the tablet is now starting to ship, I thought I'd share some more reactions.

I shared my first impressions of the Nexus 7 tablet when I was at Google I/O a couple of weeks ago, and while I liked it then, the more I use it, the more I'm finding to like. As the tablet is now starting to ship, I thought I'd share some more reactions.

As I first noticed, the Asus-built tablet has a solid feel. The 7-inch 1280-by-800 screen is the best I've seen on a $199 tablet and with a 1.2GHz quad-core Tegra 3 processor and 1GB memory, it seems quite fast. Physically, it's just a tad longer than a Kindle Fire with a bit larger bezel and it's a bit smaller than the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet. It's slightly lighter than both. It has a higher-resolution screen (the others have 1024-by-600 displays) but seems faster and more responsive than either of those (which weren't bad), probably due to the combination of a quad-core processor and the Jelly Bean version of Android. It feels as fast to use as any tablet I've tried yet, and given the low price, that's saying something.

The $199 version has 8GB of flash storage and the $249 version has 16GB. Like the Kindle Fire or the iPad, you can't expand the storage. (The Nook Tablet has a microSD card slot.) One other major hardware difference is the addition of a 1.2-megapixel camera on the front, which works fine in video chat applications, such as Google+ Hangouts.

Of course, a 7-inch tablet is going to be much easier to carry around than a larger tablet like the iPad. It's a tradeoff of convenience (lighter, and easier to carry in a coat pocket or a purse) versus size (bigger screens look better). For reading books, I like the 7-inch size more just because it's easier to hold for a long time. For newspapers and magazines, however, the larger size allows for better pictures and navigation (at least on the apps I've seen to date) and while video looks very good on the Nexus 7, size does matter.

Of course, it's the software and the content that matters more. The main home page on the device defaults to showing "My Library" with your books, music, magazines, and videos, as downloaded from Google Play. (Like most Android implementations, there are multiple start screens and you can move between them.) Similarly, the standard icons on the bottom of the screen include one for Google's own apps, plus those for books, magazine, video, music, and the Google Play store.

The media discovery and applications themselves seem to run fine, but the content isn't up to where Apple's or Amazon's is. The movie and TV selection is quite limited, the number of magazines is very limited, and while music is better, it's still not as complete as I would like. You can, however, download from a third-party site or app, such as Amazon MP3, which mitigates the content limitations somewhat. The system is designed to stream content that lives on Google's servers via Wi-Fi, but it's simple enough to download items to the tablet through a "keep on device" icon. Alternatively, it's easy to copy over music from your PC.

The books application works fine but perhaps because I use multiple devices, I'll probably use the Kindle application more, which offers a better selection and a few nice tablet-specific features.

As I said in my first impression, the magazines I looked at were not very interactive and often the text on the page looked as if it was more like an image than a rendered font. Similar content looked better on the Kindle Fire or the iPad. If you're looking for a tablet primarily for reading books or magazines, you'd probably be better off with the Amazon or Barnes & Noble entries or reading within their Android apps.

On the other kind of applications, though, the Nexus 7 is the strongest 7-inch tablet I've seen. The system runs the Jelly Bean version of Android, which I found generally quite fast and responsive. This includes Chrome as the standard browser, with multiple tabs, the ability to sync tabs across multiple devices, and a fast rendering engine. I liked it a lot. Other than Flash support (which has ended as of Android 4.1), almost everything worked well and I'm glad to see options to request the desktop versions of sites. It's the best browsing experience I've had on a mobile device.

As part of Jelly Bean, it also includes the Google Now, voice search, and notifications features that I liked in the new version of Android 4.1. They work identically to the way they do on the Galaxy Nexus phone.

My first impression was that while there are plenty of Android applications, most don't look that nice on a tablet. That's still largely true. I'm not happy with most of the media apps—the New York Times looks like a phone app minus the tablet navigation that makes the iPad version so strong, and the Wall Street Journal and USA Today Android apps say they aren't compatible. There aren't many of the tablet-style magazine apps that look so good on the iPad.

On the other hand, there are more tablet apps coming out every day. PCMag recently rounded up the Best Nexus 7 apps, some of which are really good. Most of these aren't unique to the Nexus 7, but I've used many of them and found that they do generally work quite well. In particular, I like how Pulse, Ted Talks and the comics applications work on the screen. Would I like more applications optimized for the tablet look, as on the iPad? Of course. But for an Android tablet, the Nexus 7 is very strong, and I'm sure the apps that don't work yet will get updated.

Overall, the Nexus 7 is been the best 7-inch tablet I've used by a good margin. It feels fast and responsive, and the native applications are good. If the Android tablet ecosystem hasn't yet produced enough tablet-specific applications, it does seem to be picking up nicely. While I expect Amazon and Barnes & Noble at least to come out with new models to try to compete, this sets a new bar for both inexpensive tablets and for Android tablets. It's a winner.

Michael J. Miller's Forward Thinking Blog: forwardthinking.pcmag.com
Michael J. Miller is chief information officer at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. From 1991 to 2005, Miller was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine, responsible for the editorial direction, quality and presentation of the world's largest computer publication.
Until late 2006, Miller was the Chief Content Officer for Ziff Davis Media, responsible for overseeing the editorial positions of Ziff Davis's magazines, websites, and events. As Editorial Director for Ziff Davis Publishing since 1997, Miller took an active role in...
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